TOUCH, forbidding the unknowing punter from laying a finger on the sort of items that were standard fare at any car boot sale. As soon as we crossed the threshold there was, I felt, a wrinkling of the nose, a sign of distaste at our presence. ‘Can I help you?’ said the owner of the nose, a self-styled water-colour-artist-cum-instructor, willow-thin and probably about fifty, as she emerged from the back room with a look of alarm in her eyes.
An unconvincing dialogue ensued about a furry portrait of Virginia Woolf, made from bits of old carpet sewn together and stuck in a wooden frame (£350). We could feel the owner’s eyes drilling into us as we surveyed the artfully arranged wares, principally examples of pink-tinged wholesome chintzy niceness. On offer were handmade silk pincushions, homemade paintings of flowers, gingham tablecloths, an Isle of Wight tea towel and scented candles set in tiny flowery china teacups.
Our hostess was suspicious of us and understandably so. David, tricked out in combat pants, dark glasses and a baseball cap, was the walking, attention-grabbing essence of the inner-city criminal (as the Richmond Tories used to put it). In the rural world-view there was just no credible explanation as to why a black man would travel to a village in Sussex to inspect a £70 pokerwork representation of a windmill, or peer through wraparound shades at a purple silk tasselled macramé plant potholder on sale at the bargain price of £22.50. David later said that the cottage owner might well have taken us for a gay couple up from Brighton for the day.
It was just a short walk from the artist’s cottage to the field where the village cricket pitch lay. Set into the hedge surrounding the field was a concrete machine-gun bunker dating from the Second World War. Puzzlingly, the field was relatively flat. The pitch described by Macdonell had a slope on one side with such an incline that, as he described it, when the bowler started his run-up he could not be seen by the batsman at the crease. In Macdonell’s day the bowler would only come into vision, like a distant ship appearing above the horizon, as he puffed up the incline ready to deliver the ball. The pitch also seemed far smaller than that described in 1933, and further away from the pub, which, in the twenty-first century, was not adjacent to the pitch but on the other side of the village.
Rodmell Cricket Club had erected a brick-built pavilion – complete with flagpole – in the 1980s. There was an arrangement with the local council whereby the council mowed the field and local schoolchildren could use it for sports days and the like. On the day we visited, the wives and children of the Rodmell cricket team had gathered in the pavilion to make cucumber sandwiches. The consensus among them was that the England, Their England cricket match had taken place in a field now known as Cricketing Bottom on the other side of the village. The likely site of Macdonell’s cricket match now had the ‘crinkly tin’ farm buildings on top of it, erected to replace the old ones in the centre of the village, which had been bought by developers and turned into luxury homes.
The irony hardly needed to be pointed out. The Rodmell of England, Their England had been ‘unspoilt by factories, financiers, tourists and hustle’. Now a charmless, factory-like farm building covered the cricket pitch where dragonflies had once buzzed about the players. The village was now a popular place for financiers to live. Indeed, the farmer’s house and barn was now occupied, we discovered, by the finance director of a very large energy company. In summer, the village was flooded with tourists, many of them visiting Virginia Woolf’s house (she lived in Rodmell from 1919 until her death in 1941). And there was plenty of hustle, too – from the hippy capitalism of the cottage artists to the ersatz country fayre of the village pub and the rampant hype of local estate agents.
The new cricket pitch was in a more exposed position than the old one, but it did have a view across the valley. That was, however, spoilt by the sight of a gigantic white chalk scar on the other side of the valley at Beddingham. This marked the location of an enormous landfill site used to dispose of rubbish from Lewes and most of Eastbourne. Initially, and unbeknown to the people of Rodmell and the surrounding villages, the site had also been used to store radioactive waste from Cumbria, a profitable business and, at least according to a spokesman for the company which operates the site, a safe one. ‘The waste is so low-level we can transfer it on the back of an ordinary lorry. It is handled in the same way as asbestos sheets. It’s put in a pre-excavated pit.’ Safe or not, it still sounded a bit unnerving and not very A. G. Macdonell.
When we visited, the Rodmell village cricket team was, not surprisingly, a reflection of the village’s new population of commuters and people who worked in finance. They were not very serious about cricket, and did not seem to know each other particularly well. The team included several accountants, an ‘estimator’ (whatever that meant), the aforementioned finance director of the multinational energy company and the director of a primary healthcare trust. They tended to commute to big city offices during the week, and play out the role of stout yeoman or country squire at the weekend. One of the team told us, ‘I never played cricket until I moved here – it is just that this field is here so we think “why not use it”?’
The locals were kitted out in pristine old-fashioned cricket whites, caps and cable-knit jumpers of the sort that had not been worn by anyone serious about cricket for decades. In contrast Blackboys, who were regular players, wore modern Nike-style gear, with their names emblazoned on their backs, like today’s professional cricketers. It had taken the Rodmell team a long, long time to find a date in their diaries when they were able to put a team together, perming a squad of a dozen or so from the male population of approximately two hundred.
Rodmell versus Blackboys turned out to be a ridiculously one-sided match. Blackboys batted first, and within minutes their batsmen were confidently dispatching the ball to the boundary. Rodmell’s opening bowlers were not bad, and looked as if they had played plenty of cricket long ago at school. But when the pair had each bowled their maximum number of overs, several unskilled pie-chuckers had to take their turn bowling. Further diminishing Rodmell’s chances of winning the match, their fielders were hopeless. Later, the consensus was that they had dropped a total of nine catches, and also received injuries ranging from getting hit in the face by the ball to tripping over.
As Blackboys’ innings went on, their batsmen were soon whacking the ball clear out of the ground at will. They played their shots with increasing power and verve and eventually the ball rocketed straight at the spectators in the pavilion, missing David and me – and also the skull of a six-year-old child – by millimetres before smashing a neat cricket-ball-sized hole in the glass of the pavilion door. After a couple of hours, Blackboys were 196–1. Had this been a five-day test match they would have been on track to declare at 3,000-odd runs for, say, eight wickets.
It was a big target, and when Rodmell came out to bat they didn’t look as if they would meet it. In fact, they were bowled out for forty-three. Reactions to the drubbing seemed to vary. Some of the very worst performers were self-effacing and tried to turn it into a joke, but others were clearly irked and there was a very uncricket-like snippy feeling in the air, with the slightly better players exuding resentment towards the passengers and no-hopers. It was not as though Blackboys were up to much either. The Rodmell game was to be their first win of the season and, two months and nine games later, it remained Blackboys’ only win of the season.
The last Conservative Prime Minister John Major is famous for a speech in which he quoted George Orwell on the English love of village life. ‘Fifty years on from now,’ Major had said, the country would still be a place of ‘long shadows on village cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs and old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’. By the time we arrived in Rodmell ten of those fifty years had elapsed since Major left the scene. And in Rodmell at least we discovered that his vision had already vanished almost entirely.
According to a plaque on the wall of the twelfth-century church, the last burial in the graveyard at Rodmell had taken place in 1992, the year John Major was elected Prime Minister.
It seemed to us that, however you wanted to define it, there was very little in the way of Conservatism in
